A new harvesting tool that collects location data now enables farmers to easily determine the amount of fruit produced in a specific area of an orchard, almost down to a single tree.
The PickLogger, developed by global agricultural company Agri Technovation, recently won the innovation award at the Biostimulants World Congress in the UK. It is mounted on the clippers used by harvesters, and collects location data as workers manually harvest fruit from the trees.
The GPS coordinates gathered with every snip are sent to the cloud and combined with weight data to produce harvest progress maps. The accumulated data assist farmers in making critical in-season decisions.
At the end of the harvesting period, the yield maps produced from the recorded data are collated with other available agricultural information, such as soil classification, soil chemical analysis, leaf data, irrigation data, and pest data.
This allows for well-informed decision-making and the formulation of corrective strategies, says Agri Technovation.
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